Polar bear dies after eating purse and coat that fell into zoo enclosure

Polar bear dies after eating a purse and a coat that fell into its cage.

Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images

A polar bear who ate a purse and a coat has died after attempts to save the zoo animal were to no avail. A purse and a coat fell into the polar beer’s zoo enclosure and the zoo keepers didn’t know that the polar bear ate these objects until he started acting odd and spitting up tufts of material, according to NBC News on Feb. 12.

The 25-year-old polar bear, named Anton, could have feasibly lived another 15 years. The Stuttgart Germany zoo tried to give the animal medication to make it vomit up what it had ingested, but it was too late. By that time the polar bear suffered severe internal injuries.

This accident has caused the zoo keepers to make the warnings of feeding or dropping things into the animal’s cages more of a serious warning. This one zoo alone has collected 200 children’s shoes among many other objects that have made their way into the animals enclosures in the past 25 years.

This isn’t the first animal lost at the zoo for eating inanimate objects. Charly, a sea lion, ate a teddy bear last year. Several years back a hippopotamus suffered an intestinal obstruction when ingesting a tennis ball, which killed him.

The treatment of zoo animals was under fire this week when a zoo in Copenhagen put down a healthy 18-month old giraffe. The zoo didn’t have room for it, but killed the giraffe anyway despite numerous offers globally from other zoos to take the giraffe.

Killing the giraffe was bad enough, but the zoo keepers cut the animal up for its meat in front of an audience of zoo visitors, including small children. The lions and other animals were fed the meat of the giraffe.

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Roz Zurko is a freelance writer originally from Milford, Conn. Today she writes from her home at the foot of the Berkshires in Massachusetts. Her articles have appeared in magazines, newspapers and online. She has been a guest author on BBC radio and her online articles are read by more than a million people each month.